Sunday, 5 December 2010

Liet International 2010, playing bass with Jousnen Jarved

It's always been one of my big dreams to play bass for world music and although, since having this dream in the early 90's when I was briefly a fill-in disk-jockey at an Ann Arbor, Michigan radio station - I've recorded fairly little in this regard - and of extremely variable quality, in relation to where I've actually been over the last 10 years or so. Most of my recorded stuff is from Russia, Siberia, China, (I've recorded others from Taiwan), the middle-east (stylistically), or Fenno-Scania - and I can add both Americas and Greenland to the itinerary. Occasionally, however, I do something which represents a bit of a zenith.

Ahh, but enter Jousnen Jarved, from Russia. I've been travelling to the Russian side of Karelia since the early 2000s and have worked with the project's creator, Peter Coon, for almost as long. Peter's quite the producer, having written, scored, and produced a few hard-rockingsingles for me out of his own studio in Petrozavodsk, and being an honest-to-goodness music professional in his own right, something which I am most definitely not. And so, it was like the dream fairy came and dropped this thing in my lap, as I was sitting in Helsinki, bored to death with my musical prospects there, and about ready to give up on the whole damn thing. The Liet International festival in Lorient, France, was just the ticket.

TV Renne in France, Fryslan T.V. in the Netherlands and CNN covered the event for a global audience. We're up for a spot (and hopefully rotation) on Radio St. Petersburg at some point, but I don't know the details yet.